Is there an industry where the customer doesn't let their fingers do the talking? In the last 3 months I've shopped around for drafting services and mechanics, because I need them to do some work for me and I don't want to get ripped off. Why should I expect my customers to behave any different just because I'm a software developer rather than a draftsman or mechanic?

Hmmm I've been developing software for around 10 years now, and am very much of the opinion that in terms of process, building good software is much the same as building a good bridge/building/house/car/plane etc. If you plan it out (not to the nth degree) to a reasonable level, build to that plan and verify that you've stuck to that, it's pretty hard to go wrong. If you do that well enough, you'll find that the only time you need to touch the code again is when new features are requested. I've pretty much followed that sort of methodology for years and know of several tools that I (and others) developed using that sort of methodology that were still in use with little to no modification years after we'd finished with them. I also know of plenty of other things developed using the hack and bash methods outlined in the article. Without exception, they require constant attention from the programmers who developed them in the first place. Stuff developed this way is what gives software a bad name. Some might call it job security, but that only works until the customers wise up...

Gotta say, I prefer the latter for two reasons 1.)because I can place the cursor next to one brace and find the matching one just by using the up/down arows on my keyboard. works with any text file editor, syntax aware or not (even notepad) 2.) there are occasions where want to remove the condition but keep the code block eg // if (condition) { // do something } Easy to achieve either way of course, but just that little bit easier the second way (because you only need to "play" with one line. Having said that, the company I work for uses the first method, so I'm pretty much stuck with it. After the first 5 minutes using a particular style professionals will get used to it. If someones skills are that shaky that "weird" braces cause them to melt down, they'd probably want to be brushing up on those software engineering 101 skills...:laugh: Karl

Raize font. 10 or 12 pt (big, but I'm on a dual screen system...) Heard about this font at a borland conference once. Didn't like the default font in delphi and thought I'd try it http://www.raize.com/DevTools/Tools/RzFont.asp[^]

The similarity between your code example and a Delphi/C++Builder DFM file are amazing :) Seriously though, with stuff like this it seems that between the designer and WPF (is that the right acronym, I can never remember...) .NET and VCF are making some real strides. One thing that Borland and VCL (by the way, does VCF stand for "Visual Component Framework"?) never managed was a way of making it easy to separate the UI/ Event handlers from the business logic. It's just too easy to go to the generated event handler function stub and start coding. Do you have a plan in mind for that?

"Computer manufacturers may restrict your from installing another operating system or even a newer version of the same operating system because they want you to buy a new computer with it pre installed." Is that a bit like when you buy a Mac?